NOTES is a thought-provoking audiobook best consumed slowly, leaving time for reflection on editor Nina Collins's reason for including each piece in the collection before taking in another installment. Collins, the author's daughter, says her intent is to show her mother's literary range. Each narrator provides a new experience for each literary offering, whether it's prose, an incomplete screenplay, or a letter. The well-known narrators give gravitas to the disquieting truths about a black woman's interior life. The most fascinating part of this work is the narrators' care with the plays and screenplays. Each narrator follows the author's stage directions, lending sorrow, surprise, haughtiness, and fear to the various characters. This is a work that will be listened to--even if only in parts--time and again.
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062892270
Publisher: Harper Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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